By Jeremy Gavin
Founder, Screenfeed

With any media there is a value-exchange in which the viewer provides its attention to get something it wants — entertainment or information — while the media owner gets what it wants — the ability to share its message. As is most often the case, the messages are advertisements or promotions that, if running 100 percent of the time, will simply turn off viewers, and the media owner loses its commodity, the audience.

So it is important to provide the viewer something for their attention, but the entire reason you have digital screens in place is to deliver your message. To the point that entertainment content helps deliver your message, it should be used.

As to the percentage, let’s take a look at other media: Television provides roughly 75 percent content and 25 percent advertising. Radio varies but averages about 65 percent content and 35 percent advertising. Magazines, when they can do so, fill 60 percent of their pages with ads and 40 percent with editorial content.

Before settling on how digital out-of-home should compare, we need to identify one big difference. The audiences of the above mediums choose to watch, listen or read. In our case, we are often broadcasting at them and looking to grab their attention.

I contend that the balance of advertising versus the editorial/entertainment content should follow closer to magazines and a 50/50 split. We can’t boast the quality of content experience of broadcast, and radio’s ratio is simply not enough to meet our objectives.

Once you have your percentage set, the other major factor is how you program your loop to ensure you grab attention AND deliver your message. If you have someone in front of your screen for two minutes, you can’t play a 2:30 entertainment spot and believe you are meeting your objectives.

Like other mediums, we also don’t know how long we’ll have them. Television has some likelihood that it can expect a certain number of its viewers will watch a complete show. Radio may have an understanding of the average time of a commute to work and magazine publishers, well, they just tell their advertisers everyone looks at every page, cross their fingers and hope they believe it.

With digital out-of-home, we need to understand the dwell time (the time we have someone in the vicinity of the screen with an opportunity to watch) and plan accordingly.

If you have someone at a gas pump, you can assume you’ve got the time it takes to fill up the gas tank. You should select media that is short and sweet so that they are entertained by a short clip and also are delivered two or three advertisements during the same time.

So create that value-exchange with your viewer. Give them short segments of interesting information or entertainment, but only toward the goal of ensuring your messages are delivered as well.

This article was reprinted with permission from the Digital Signage Connection and originally appeared here.

As founder and head content chef of Screenfeed, Mr. Gavin is passionate about making high-quality, licensed content accessible as a tool for those implementing digital signage. His company Screenfeed provides custom-produced news, infotainment, weather, traffic, sports stats and video shorts delivered over the cloud for plug-n-play usage in digital signage software.

A member of the DSE advisory board content council, Jeremy Gavin offered this tip in his response to Ask the Board on Sept. 30, 2013: “If a digital signage network is used for advertising or promotion, what would you recommend as the best ratio of ad spots to relevant interstitial content, the maximum length for individual ad spots and the frequency of ad spots in the playloop?” Find more content tips from DSE’s advisory board here.